Self Healing Computers

[Argo]

Not a bad idea, computers that can fix themselves. Thought this does cause me alittle concern, "Part of his job will be getting customers more comfortable with letting computers come up with advice on how they can be used better, and then enabling those systems to take that advice without the go-ahead from technology workers, he said."

Article at CNN.com

[redrumloa]

"Part of his job will be getting customers more comfortable with letting computers come up with advice on how they can be used better, and then enabling those systems to take that advice without the go-ahead from technology workers, he said."

Sounds like Cyberdyme Systems.

Freaky.

[blobrana]

Team this up with the self-evolving chipset ( yes it exists) and it`ll reprogramm itself to be more adaptive/useful...

[olegil]

I believe that's spelled Cyberdyne, but there's nothing to worry about. I won't be back ;-)

[yssing]

Sounds like Cyberdyne Systems.  Freaky

They really should not do this.
Havent they seen T1/T2 and so on...
Wargames

Or maybe we should just give those computers the 3 basic Asimov rules for robots...
Yeah right, like that will help a lot if they can reprogram them selves....

Rigth commander Data  :-)

[redrumloa]

I believe that's spelled Cyberdyne, but there's nothing to worry about. I won't be back

Yes you are right, I mistyped it.

It makes you wonder.. Start making computers self sufficient.. What if they did become self aware. Sounds like fantasy land, but what if?
 :-?

[blubbe]

Self-aware computers.

When you try to shut down the computer, it screams:
NOOoo, dont kill me, I want to live!

[Nick]

@blubble

I see your point. You have brought up a real point. We could end uo with something far worse than T1/T2 we could end up with Jonny5. Oh no we don`t want that. NO DISASSEMBLE JONNY5!

Who needs Cyberdyne systems and Mr Dyson when you could have Nova and an Indian guy and some silly American with silly hair.

[Argo]

That's what my initial though was. Terminators stamped with IBM logos.

[Argo]

What you never saw the Matrix? or the 1970's movie "Colossus: The Forbin Project"?

[Waccoon]

The idea of the self-repairing computer is the worst idea ever since the System Registry.  I don't suppose any of these geeks ever heard of the term, "Looking for trouble".  Even a small bug can snowball into a HUGE problem, and since it's all automatic, there's nothing you can do about it.  It's better to just make the architecture simpler to understand, so things don't go wrong in the first place.

A good example of how this gets out of control is Plug N Play.  With a WindowsNT system, you can remove and add hardware and manage things manually.  So, if you remove hardware, the machine will retain all the settings (config files), and then you just have to turn off the driver.  That's the ONLY thing I like about working on NT systems.  It doesn't make a little hardware problem into a big problem.

Now enter smarter "PNP" systems.  Remove the hardware, and the OS will "clean up" what's left behind.  I pull hardware from Win2000 systems a lot, and I have to re-setup the damn stuff every time it detects the hardware again, not to mention the fact that hardware detection is the #1 reason why the machines boot up so slowly.  Even if the driver is already in the System folder, sometimes Windows doesn't "see" it, because the setup profiles have been destroyed and must be rebuilt.  Windows destroys these profiles intentionally, under the reasoning that it's better to rebuild profiles from scratch, rather than risk having a bad profile.

Pull an ethernet card, and the network address will expire.  Plug it back in, and you'll have to run IPConfig to get it working again...

Pull a graphics card, and your settings go back to VGA defaults.  Put the card back in, and you have to reset everything back to 1280x1024, 32 bit color, reset the font sizes...  and so on.

Just think about how much more complicated this will get when Operating Systems start containing 100 million lines of code, and more.  (Actually, isn't XP already at that point)?

People need to remember that computers are just tools, and will only follow instructions.  If you program an android to automatically fix a cut finger, it might very well chop of an arm.

If you're worried about data loss, use the tried and true (but seldom practiced) solution:  make a backup!

[cecilia]

hhhmmm, none of my computers ever had a boo boo :-o

[yssing]

That's what my initial though was. Terminators stamped with IBM logos.

Better IBM than MS, and MS would have the money to develop such a things.... SHRUG

[olegil]

MS Cyberdyne:
We've all seen ze movies, right? "I'll be back". Laser guns and ####.

IBM Cyberdyne:
Small, geeky terminators with dozens of gigabit ethernet ports trying to prove they are better at network processing than each other by coming up with new ways to benchmark all the time.
Evil mastermind mainframes who insist on crushing the human race by playing chess.

And so on.  :-P

(guess who is on IBM's marketdroid-speeches-aimed-at-r&d-engineers powerpc mailinglist  ;-)  )

[Coder]

First thing such a computer would do is wipe off any M$ products. :-D

Coder